John Breslin

National University of Ireland, Galway

@johnbreslin / johnbreslin.com

Lecturer at NUI Galway

College of Engineering and

Informatics

• Researcher at DERI, NUI Galway

Social, semantics and me

1990/1991: VAX/VMS“MAP.COM”

VMS BULLETIN redux

1998: Set up a gaming forum2000: Co-founded boards.ie from this

• Ireland’s largest discussion forum site

• 2.25 million visitors/month (~40% of Irish population)

• Irish people seeking information, or just chatting about sports, TV, politics, health, whatever

Via Kerstinxkcd.com/802

2004: Joined DERI, founded the SIOC project

• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

• Enables interoperability and exchange of social content:– Blogs, forums, wikis...

2011: Co-founder of StreamGlider, Inc.

• Real-time streaming newsreader

• Supports social, multimedia, news

• Can be used as an enterprise dashboard

• With Nova Spivack and Bill McDaniel

Social platforms are like data silos

image from pidgintech.com

Many isolated communities of users and their data

image from pidgintech.com

Need ways to connect these islands

image from pidgintech.com

Allowing users to easily travel from one to another

image from pidgintech.com

Enabling users to easily bring their data with them

image from pidgintech.com

Object-centred sociality (AKA social objects)

• Users are connected via a common object:

– Their job, university, hobbies, interests, a date…

• “According to this theory, people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object. […]Good services allow people to create social objects that add value.” – Jyri Engestrom– Flickr = photos– del.icio.us = bookmarks– Blogs = discussion posts

It’s the social objects we create…

• Discussions

• Bookmarks

• Annotations

• Profiles

• Microblogs

• Multimedia

…that connect usto other people

Semantics

image from richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2011-09-19_colored.png

Social semantic representation models

Using ontologies to model social data

Two-way street: the Semantic Web can help social spaces, vice versa

• Can use the Semantic Web to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together so that social spaces can interoperate via semantics

• In the other direction, object-centered social spaces can serve as rich social data sources for semantic applications

image from tinyurl.com/highway2

The Social Semantic Web

FOAF

Friend Of A Friend

What is FOAF?

• An ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them:– http://foaf-project.org/– Identity, personal profiles and social networks– Can be integrated with other SW vocabularies

• FOAF on the Web:– LiveJournal, MyOpera, identi.ca, MyBlogLog, hi5,

Fotothing, Videntity, FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad

FOAF at a glance

Distributed identity with FOAF

SIOC, pronounced shock

image from tinyurl.com/siocshock

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the Social Web– sioc-project.org– W3C member submission in 2007– SIOC has been adopted in a framework of applications

or modules deployed on hundreds of sites– Web 2.0, enterprise information integration, HCLS, e-

government

image from tinyurl.com/friendship2

Some of the SIOC core ontology classes and properties

Some applications using SIOC

RDFa on newsweek.com

RDFa in Drupal 7

• Drupal CMS used by 2% of all sites (7% of CMS)– 24% of .gov sites

• Drupal 7 release has Semantic Web support built-in• RDFa (SIOC, FOAF, Dublin Core, SKOS) data for blog

posts, forums, etc. • Video at www.semantic-drupal.com

image from tinyurl.com/drupaper

image from tinyurl.com/orionw

SIOC can be used to...

• ...provide a layer of rdfa metadata from a social website, e.g. to enhance search results >> superceded by schema.org?

• ...get a complete representation/XML dump of a social website (export, import)

• ...be a native format for social websites

• ...do other stuff; just imagine!

How much SSW data is out there?

images (this one and later backgrounds) from publicdomainpictures.net

CommonCrawl

• Muehleisen and Bizer– LDOW @ WWW 2012

• 1.5 billion web pages• 3 billion RDF quads• SIOC available from

at least 22k PLDs (pay-level domains)

• FOAF on 27k PLDs

• Results published on Monday 2 July 2012 at:

• webdatacommons.org/vocabulary-usage-analysis/index.html

We have made all this SSW data, now let us dream about build the useful applications!

Make a giant brain(-storm!)

• Distributed conversation navigator

• Comment search engine for the A in Q&A

• Expert finding applications galore

...

– Be cognisant of the huge growth in Social Semantic Web data being provided by the adopters of schema.org and its new terms

OPO (online presence ontology)

• Aims to unify presence information and status notification processes across different services:

– Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.

• Help solve the information overload issue at the same time, by providing a means to identify who / which community the information should reach: sharing spaces

MOAT (meaning of a tag)

• moat-project.org

• A model to define "meanings" of tags

– SPARQL → dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL

• User-driven interlinking

• Tagged content enters Linked Data web

• Collaborative approach towards the sharing of meanings in a community

image from tinyurl.com/whichapple

An ontology stack for the Social Semantic Web

Use case: Boeing inSite

Summary

• Object-centred sociality refers to how we really use social spaces:– Can use semantics to describe this usage, by

representing objects for linkage and reuse• Describe people, networks, content, presence,

knowledge, tags, etc. with semantics• Providing solutions for novel uses on the public Web

and in enterprise intranets

image from tinyurl.com/starshiptr

…at Amazon.com

Slides at www.slideshare.net/Cloud

Our book…